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SEATTLE, June 8, 2017 / PRNewswire/ — The Paid Leave Project today released a comprehensive Playbook that helps companies build a business case for offering paid family and medical leave to all employees. The Paid Leave Project is a new initiative from Panorama, a non-profit action tank working to solve global problems through audacious thinking and bold action.

The Playbook is based on research by Panorama and The Boston Consulting Group, which reviewed the paid leave policies of more than 250 companies and interviewed 25 human resource leaders at large organizations. The Playbook makes a complicated topic easier to grasp, breaking down common misperceptions about paid leave. “The Playbook addresses one common myth employers face, that offering paid leave benefits costs companies too much money. Our research demonstrates otherwise,” said Angela Romei, director of Panorama’s Paid Leave Project. “This is good news for employers and employees.” Using the Playbook, a company can:

Learn about paid family and medical leave in the United States: what it is, how it works, and what other companies are doing.

Assess its own approach to paid leave, evaluate the business benefits and estimate potential costs.

Many companies provide no more than the unpaid leave required by the Family Medical Leave Act. The goal of The Paid Leave Project is to increase access to quality paid family and medical leave in the U.S., and a comprehensive Playbook is one way to help. Panorama is working directly with companies to help them build a business case for paid leave programs that enable them to stay ahead of their competition and attract and retain the best employees.

Like Fairygodboss, where we track which employers are improving their paid leave policies, the BCG team has taken note of this trend. To get a better sense of why companies are moving in this direction, BCG analyzed the policies of more than 250 mid- and large-size companies and spoke to 25 HR leaders at large organizations.

What did they conclude? Employers find that there’s a strong business case for providing paid family leave for a variety of reasons, including improved talent retention and attraction.

The goal of BCG’s report is to make this information more accessible to companies that are considering updating their policies. When the team did case work on paid family leave, oftentimes companies reported that when they looked into restructuring their paid family leave policies, they spent a lot of time just trying to figure out what was going on in the market.

“We wanted to provide a synthesized view of the current state as well as share the learnings we gained from talking to a diverse set of companies about their experience designing and implementing paid leave policies,” says BCG partner Trish Stroman, who co-authored the report (along with Gabrielle Fitzgerald, Wendy Woods, Shalini Unnikrishnan, and Liz Bird).

A new Boston Consulting Group report makes the case that organizations that offer paid family leave see higher retention rates, better results from employee recruitment, and improved morale—especially since relatively few employers offer the benefit at this time.

What does the furniture retailer IKEA have in common with the U.S. Department of Defense?

If you answered “similar taste in decor,” you’re wrong, unless IKEA recently started offering its Kivik couches with a camo print. But if you guessed that they both offer their employees paid family leave, you’re on the right track.

A new Boston Consulting Group report [PDF] on the subject of paid leave calls out the two employers for offering the benefit, which tends to be uncommon in some industries. The BCG report, written from the perspective that paid family leave is unlikely to become federal law anytime soon, instead makes the case that the added cost pays for itself in other ways.

“Though the benefits can be hard to measure, companies report that the payoff from offering paid family leave exceeds the costs,” the report states. “And companies report that they are able to manage the cost of their programs through thoughtful design.”